Grey's Anatomy: Grey Matter

Debora Cahn on "Love/Addiction"...

Addiction.  Who doesn’t love a good addiction?  I know I do.  You try something.  You like it.  You try it again.  You build a little ritual around it, make it a special part of your day.  You tell time by it.  “Must be noon, cause I’m jonesing for another cup of my special English tea!”  or  “I know it’s morning cause I’m awake and ready for a hit of crystal meth!”

DON’T DO METH, KIDS.

See, here’s the thing:  anything can be addictive.  And it’s not always easy to spot when something slips down that slippery slope from experiment to habit to addiction.  Derek and Meredith thought they’d ended it.  Cold turkey.  White knuckle.  Over.  So over.  Well, it wasn’t totally over.  There was a bit of a hang-over.  A little no-strings-attached sex.  Just for old times sake.  No harm, no foul.  But the thing is, there is harm.  Derek doesn’t like it.  He wants to talk.  He wants to sleep over.  He wants lunch, with the woman he loved, or loves, or has some impossible to define love related interaction with.  He’s settling for just the sex, cause that’s all she’s willing to indulge.  But that’s only hurting him.  It’s just enough of the drug to keep him hooked.  Never enough to satisfy him, only enough to make him want more.  And he knows.  He knows he’s got a problem, but he can’t walk away.

Love.  It’s like crystal meth. 

DON’T DO METH.

Even Callie’s strung out.  Callie, who always seemed stronger than the rest of them.  More together.  Less at the mercy of her emotions.  Sure, George’s on-again, off-again interest, his loosey goosey commitment made her kind of nuts, but she always seemed like she was handling it.  Now she’s walking around the hospital like a crazy person.  Falling down on the job, which she NEVER does.  Unable to concentrate on anything other than the sneaking suspicion that her husband’s having an affair.  She knows it, in her heart she can’t deny it.  But she can’t face it either.  She’s in a marriage that’s destroying her, and her husband’s about to come clean and maybe put them both out of their misery, but she can’t let him do it.  She can’t let him say it.  She’d rather be a strung out junkie than deal with the pain of withdrawal.

That’s a pretty serious drug.

BUT NOT AS SERIOUS AS CRYSTAL METH, WHICH YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T DO.

I watched this documentary on crystal meth.  The fabulous Stacy McKee saw this documentary called “Montana Meth” right when we were starting to put together this story, and she told me to watch it, and EEEEW.  Meth is a nasty drug, and it makes you do nasty, gnarly things, like trade sex with people who don’t shower for a hit that doesn’t even make you feel good, and all sorts of other things that I don’t even want to get into.  I watched it with my 15 year-old niece, figured I’d do a little, “I’m your cool aunt and I’ll show you this documentary on meth and scare you away from drugs” and I’m a little worried that I traumatized her for life.  Meth is foul.  Don’t do meth.

And don’t get into relationships with people who can’t handle them.  Don’t you just want to shake Derek and Callie?  Don’t you want to shake them and say, “These people keep telling you they can’t give you what you want – believe them!”  But shaking them wouldn’t help.  Because they’re addicted.  They can’t walk away even when they want to. 

Maybe it’s okay.  Maybe you can’t avoid addiction, all you can do is pick your poison.  Special English tea is better than meth, and love’s better than special English tea.  It may put you through the ringer sometimes, but when it’s good, it’s really really good.  Worth coming back to, time and time again.  Worth getting hooked on.

Debora Cahn on "Scars and Souvenirs"...

Original airdate: 3-15-07

Izzie and George sleep together.

Izzie and George sleep together.

And what does sleep mean, really, it could mean anything, which is what you figure’s going through Izzie’s head when she pulls up the sheet to check if she’s wearing anything, and the answer is, “No.  Nothing at all.  You’re naked in a bed with your best friend, and it sure as hell looks like he’s naked too.  Everybody’s naked and in the bed and have been for a while and they have bed head and are naked.”   So sleep could just mean sleep, but probably doesn’t.

The moments you wait for, in a job like this, are ones like when Shonda calls you into the writer’s room and says, “You know how we talked about how maybe George and Izzie sleep together?  Put that in your episode.”  That’s when you smile, and try to be cool, and say, “Oh, sure, I can find room for that.” And then you leave the writer’s room and do the biggest happy dance you’ve ever done, and it goes on for a while, until you realize somebody from the script department is standing nearby and watching and now thinks you’re epileptic. 

Izzie and George sleep together.

Well it was bound to happen, right?  Best friends.  They get each other like nobody else gets them.  They share everything.  It’s easy.  It’s natural.  It’s like gravity, how can you fight it?  How can you not fall?  Okay, there’s a way to not fall.  Lots of people don’t sleep with their best friend.  In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to assure my husband that I’ve never slept with any of my best friends, and I don’t plan to start any time soon.  But it makes sense, in a way, right?  Isn’t that the fantasy?  That the guy and the best friend can be the same person?  That Izzie and George, who have shared every minute of the most intense time in their lives, turned to each other in every success and every failure and every breakup and every triumph, with every piece of gossip and every bit of pain, should share…everything?  Share their hearts and their souls and… all their other parts?  It makes sense, right?  Right up to the “he’s married” part.  That’s where it all kind of falls apart.

Oh Callie.  Callie gets a pretty raw deal around here.  She’s tough.  Which is good.  She needs to be.  But she gets a pretty raw deal.  More on that later.

Back to sleeping with your best friend… We’ve spent some time here today wondering if this is going to encourage a whole bunch of people deciding to sleep with their best friends.  And who knows what would come of that.  All I’ll say is, if your best friend’s married, I don’t recommend it.  But if your best friend’s single, and so are you, and you always kind of thought of them as the guy you go to for advice about guys, maybe you should tilt your head to the side and see if they look a little different.  Roll the dice.  Who knows?  Maybe the best relationship you’ll ever have…you’re already having.  Let us know how that works out. 

But George is married.  So there’s not really a way this can work out well.

Oh Callie. 

Now, to be fair, Callie is not some innocent, trod-upon martyr.  She lied.  About something kind of big.  And then flew off the handle when she found out George told his friends.  And she flies off the handle at George a lot.  The whole, “Why am I always the dog getting whopped on the nose with the newspaper” thing?  I think he’s really got a point there.  Callie was into the relationship first, and pissed that George wasn’t there faster.  Callie was in love first, and pissed that George wasn’t there faster.  There’s a lot of Callie being pissed for George having feelings different than hers, and he’s allowed to have his own feelings.  She doesn’t have to enjoy it, but she can’t really blame him for it, and she does.  A lot.  He’s apologizing, a lot.  And that’s just got to be exhausting.

Still shouldn’t turn around and sleep with his best friend, though.  That’s not cool either.

Izzie and George. 

I’m not going to get into the Meredith, and the Derek, and the dinner, and the father, and Cristina and Burke and Colin, who we love, not just for his dashing British accent, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, and Alex, and the tragically deformed Jane Doe, because I rambled endlessly about all that on the podcast I did with Betsy yesterday and I don’t want to repeat myself. (My first podcast.  Very intimidating.  Kind of horrifying, really, though Betsy is just masterful, and I think in a few years will have her own talk show.)  And because I’ve now taken up about all the real estate they want to give me on the Izzie and George.  But I’m okay with that, in the end.  I think I am.  Because… you know… Izzie slept with George.

Debora Cahn on "Sometimes a Fantasy"

Original Airdate:  10-5-06

So I’m one of the new kids.  There are some new writers on Grey’s this year, and at the beginning, being the new kid felt alarmingly like it did when I was nine and went to sleep-away camp with a bunch of girls who had Jordache jeans and I didn’t have Jordache jeans and I was really convinced it was going to be the end for me.  Everyone here on the staff was incredibly sweet and welcoming, and yet still I had major “What the hell do I wear today” anxieties, and “Oh my god, I just spoke a sentence that used the word ‘like’ fourteen times” anxieties, and… all the anxieties really.  I had them all.  You’d think that past age 30 you kind of get that crap under control.  Apparently not.  So be patient with my blog, because it’s my first blog, and I don’t know what I’m doing.

The nervous condition came and went over the first weeks on the job, but I think I officially got over it dealing with Cristina and the chicken.  Cristina’s decided she’s going to help Burke get back on the horse after his hand surgery, (so sweet, so generous, so unexpected from Cristina) and she’s going to do it by having him practice operating on dead chickens.  So when it came time to shoot the episode, there were long conversations with the fantastic production team about the hacking of the chicken.  Was it just a chicken breast?  Was it a whole fryer?  The folks from sets and props had to design a cutting board that could be built into Burke’s counter top, so it wouldn’t fly off the counter, as there was a lot of concern about Sandra Oh getting hit in the face with either a meat cleaver or a chicken.  The conversation continued when we hit the stage to rehearse the move with Sandra.  Could she get through the bird in one hack or would it take two?  (I thought it should be one.  It was important to me.  I don’t know why.)  We had rehearsal chickens. We had stunt chickens.  We discovered that the stunt chickens, which had balloons inside them instead of bones, emitted some sort of evil stinky salmonella gas that threatened to kill Sandra on the spot.  It was scary.  In the end, she made it through in one incredibly satisfying hack.  The whole thing just made me really happy.

That and the threesome, which was pretty happy-making too.  I think if I was having a dream about being in bed with Derek Shepherd and Finn Dandridge, and my roommate woke me up, I’d come at him with a salmonella-coated meat cleaver.  The dream scene, which turned out so beautifully, was a riot on the stage.  Ellen and Chris and Patrick couldn’t stop laughing.  Not for a minute.   And yet it came out looking so dreamy and idyllic.  And even after the dream, Meredith is so optimistic, so idyllically happy about the prospect of dating two men at the same time.  It never worked for me – dating more than one guy at a time.  I’m married now, and so I look back fondly on my playing the field days, but it was always a nightmare when there was more than one person in the mix.  I couldn’t keep it all straight.  I couldn’t remember what I said to whom, and who had told me the story about putting a dead cat in their freezer.  It wasn’t dreamy and idyllic, it was stressful.  And yet Meredith seems to handle it so well.  Better than the guys, certainly, who get so wrapped up in the competition, they can’t seem to focus on the girl.   

And then there’s George, who’s so focused on the girl he can’t think straight.  But not in a good way.  She’s in his space.  It’s one of those you-don’t-have-a-place-to-live-and-we-sleep-together-half-the-time-anyway-so-why-don’t-you-move-in-with-me impulse moves that are always a terrible idea.  Terrible.  And yet it happens all the time.  Particularly in places like New York, where the rent is through the roof, and so it seems totally reasonable to ditch your crappy 6th floor walk-up that you share with three friends and somebody’s unemployed cousin Waldo and move in with your new dude, even though you’ve only had three dates, and you’re not sure what his last name is.  I’ve been there. It’s a crappy idea.  It never would have occurred to George and Callie to shack up that early in the relationship.  But she was homeless and it seemed like the polite thing to do, and suddenly he’s made the offer and backing out of it seems rude and horribly cruel, and yet he can’t handle this.   And so he’s a basket case all day.  TR’s performance of “Robin, he just marches into the Batcave, like, here I am, give me some tights, I’m gonna borrow your towel” could not have been more fabulous.

And how about Supergirl?  First of all, I still can’t believe we landed Little Miss Sunshine.  Abigail Breslin may be the best actor I’ve ever seen.  She’s ten, or nine, or some young age where she shouldn’t be the best actor anyone’s ever seen and yet she’s amazing.  And how adorable is Alex with her?  Just when you thought you couldn’t fall any more in love with him in, suddenly he’s being nice to children and it’s all over.   

But my favorite thing might be Addison slapping Mark.  It was Shonda’s idea.  I thought she was insane.  I said, “She’s trying to let him down easy, he just flew across the country to scratch her itch, she’s buried her about-to-be-divorcee devastation in his very well defined chest, he’s proclaiming his true love, she can’t slap him in the face.”  And Shonda replied, “Yes.  She can.”  And so it went in the script, and sure enough, Shonda was right.  It was amazing.  Kate Walsh pulled it off brilliantly.  She’s as surprised as he is, when it happens.  It’s a panic move.  She smacks him because if she doesn’t, she’ll just kiss him again, and then her clothes’ll be off again, right there on the floor of Joe’s Bar, and she can’t have that, she has to get on with her life. 

Izzie’s trying to get on with her life too, in an incredibly valiant way.  But she can’t.  It was heartbreaking, watching her standing outside that hospital all day.  It was 95 degrees out when we shot it, and she’s wearing Denny’s sweater, so on top of the emotional devastation, we were a little worried Katie Heigl was going to pass out.  Katie was fine.  But Izzie was wrecked.  She thought that she could take back her life, through sheer force of will, but it’s too much.  We all wanted her to walk through that door.  We all wanted to believe that she could bounce back.  Still be a doctor.  Be a superhero.  Step out of the wreckage, brush herself off, and walk on.  But she can’t.

It was incredible to watch, and incredible to be a part of.  I’m still nervous most of the time, convinced that at any moment they’re going to turn to me and say “You, you don’t belong here, away with you.”  But until that happens, it’s a great ride.